Hello. I'd like to make a post about a game that's near and dear to my heart.

Doom.

I played Doom when I was in 2nd grade. I recall playing the first room a billion times because I didn't know how to open doors, so my father would reset the game for me every 15 minutes so that I could kill the two bad guys over and over again. The next day I went to school with violent tendencies and -- became a cartoonist!

IF ONLY MY FATHER KNEW THAT VIOLENT GAMES WOULD ALTER MY FUTURE IN SUCH A HORRIFIC WAY!

But Doom was just a gateway game to the hard stuff. Age of Empires, Syndicate, and Chex Quest.

A few years later my mom was called in to school to discuss a serious problem. My teacher laid out my classwork in front of her. Behind every page were terrible drawings of stickfigure catapult war scenes, monsters from Biomenace, and a scribbly picture of the "Flemoidus Cycloptis." My mother didn't know what to make of it. After that she made sure I did my homework as soon as I got home.

(But she locked me in the bathroom a week later when she found out I drew sunglasses and a sweet goatee on every picture of Jesus in my catechism work-book.)

Things got worse when the teacher at school gave every student a journal. I had a game concept I just had to write down and share with the whole class. A marvelous game with a title given to me by a friend: "The Death of Jackson Teachers". I'll admit the title was a little extreme, the teacher thought it was going to be a murder simulator like the ones she saw on T.V. but I saw it as a platformer where the enemies would throw office referrals at the player. If only I had a little more time that morning to flesh out a Game Design Doc...

I don't remember what happened after that. I do know that the teacher hated me and that I was one of the most disliked kids in class. But eventually I shaped up and moved on to middle school where I found a bunch of other violent nerds like me and I'm still friends with each one to this day. There's no moral to this story. Do violent videogames affect children? Of course they do. Some more than others to the point where they want to make violent games of their own. The only difference between young me and now me is that I can do it more tastefully.